In the News 15.05.15 : Today’s Articles of Interest from around the Internets

“DiPascali made a phone call, and his staff quickly put together a fake ledger on a computer to reflect the billions of shares the accounts in question supposedly held. But the document, literally hot off the office printer, needed its recent origin disguised. As DiPascali later told the story, he “did a little soft shoe” and chatted to distract the auditor in a conference room while his staff quickly cooled the newly minted ledger in an office refrigerator, then tossed it around “like a medicine ball” to give it the patina of age and hard use. DiPascali handed it over, and the auditor left, satisfied.”

“Jonze, 45, does not have the jaded outlook of someone who has spent the past 15 years in Hollywood. Wide-eyed, curious and lacking cynicism, he has a sharp sense of humour. He is not in Cuba to make a movie. He is interviewing Lores for Vice, a brand which started out in 1994 as a music and fashion magazine and has evolved into a sprawling, youth-focused media empire spanning TV, digital channels and publishing. He is in Havana with his friend Shane Smith, Vice’s co-founder and chief executive, and a crew to film a segment for the company’s news magazine programme, which airs on HBO in the US. Vice also has a four-year deal to produce a daily, half-hour news programme for HBO and operates Vice News, an online digital channel, plus a network of other online channels (or “verticals”) specialising in subjects such as music, technology and sport.”

“Normally, Letterman doesn’t love talking about himself; what he wants to say, he says on his show. But today, he’s sitting for an exit interview of sorts. A few weeks from now, at approximately 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 20th, Letterman will wave good night, the lights at the Ed Sullivan Theater will go dark, and the Late Show With David Letterman will have taped its last episode. There’s a long goodbye scheduled before then, featuring a once-in-a-lifetime lineup of A-list guests — Hanks, Clooney, Seinfeld, Winfrey, Murray, Roberts, at least one Obama — as well as plenteous highlights from his 22 years on CBS. It’s shaping up to be the kind of star-studded send-off television may never see again. And Letterman, of course, is not looking forward to it.”

“A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions,” Italo Calvino wrote in his magnificent letter on reproductive rights, “but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.” Thirty-five years earlier, in 1940, Anaïs Nin made the same point with even greater precision and prescience when she wrote in her diary: “Motherhood is a vocation like any other. It should be freely chosen, not imposed upon woman.” And yet here we are decades later, with millennia of human civilization under our belt — aspirin to Austen, Guggenheim to Google, bicycle to Bach — still subscribing to the same primitive biological imperative that a life unprocreated is a life wasted; still succumbing to the tyrannical cultural message that opting out of parenthood is a failure of ambition or magnanimity or social duty, or simply the symptom of a profound character flaw. Being childless by choice — like being alone, like living alone — is still considered by unspoken consensus the errant choice.”

“The hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive creator of Bitcoin, has captivated even those who think the virtual currency is some sort of online Ponzi scheme. A legend has emerged from a jumble of facts: Someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto released the software for Bitcoin in early 2009 and communicated with the nascent currency’s users via email — but never by phone or in person. Then, in 2011, just as the technology began to attract wider attention, the emails stopped. Suddenly, Satoshi was gone, but the stories grew larger.”